Window on the World - John Alder
John Alder
Film maker
John Alder came up from Tyneside for opening night and was sidetracked into the Traverse office. He's Gorgeous Avatar's own weather maker, responsible for creating the snow, rain, sun and landscapes appearing on the set's plasma screen. He's also a composer and founder member of The Jags, but we didn't get time to go into that. Fortunately, it's all here.
What's been your role in this production?
I've been involved in creating a background which is essentially a window in a cottage. It has to range from looking very realistic - like we're actually looking out the window of a cottage - and it also has to convey seasons in the play. The play is set in autumn, so there's always a default image of a sunny autumn that we go back to, but from time to time, because of the way the play's structured, synthetic seasons are involved. So we get winter - almost like a cartoon winter, with graphical snow. We get a cartoon spring, and the window box keeps changing to convey that idea, skies keep changing, we get a very heightened summer.
What was the process?
Philip [Howard, director] wanted lots of different ideas, because he wanted to know what was possible. In the end, I'd obviously film the landscape in the Borders, where the play is set, so I had to create a false version of that. So I filmed some scenery round where I live, and did the sort of things I would be doing with the final landscape. I used lots of naturalistic filming. I changed the sky against the landscape, so we could have the same landscape with various skies. I then took things further into the digital world, so I pixelated the sky, so that it goes all lumpy - like you get when people's faces are pixelated in crime scenes. And also, to take it further into the computer world, I had things like familiar icons from computer technology floating through the sky with clouds. So basically I gave Philip a bag of examples, from which he could say 'I like that, I don't like that', and so on.
And how did your location shoot with Mark [Leese, designer] pan out?
We went out on different days. Mark went out into the Borders - a ten-mile radius around Yetholm - and he chose various sites that he wanted to use for the eventual big backdrop, which is the light box at the back of the stage. He then told Gavin, the production manager, the different places that he wanted to go to. Subsequently, about three days later, I went up into the Borders and went round with Gavin. He showed me all the different locations and I picked the one that I thought was the most filmic and the most simple, because I think it was important for it to look sculptural, rather than having any busy things like farms in it, or too many busy trees. And as luck would have it, I picked exactly the place that Mark chose to take the photographs in the first place.
What's the story of the horse?
Philip decided that he wanted a horse, and I started off with some footage of a horse I'd shot earlier on, but it was just a boring old brown horse, and we wanted a white stallion. So I know some people down in Newcastle who are part of Amber Films. The head of Amber Films is a bit of a horse wheeler-dealer in his spare time. So he happened to have seen a white stallion leading a cortege at a funeral recently - a beautiful white stallion called Silver Dollar - and said he was sure the people who owned it would be over the moon to let me film it. It was three miles from the place where I live - near Tynemouth - and the woman was very happy. Firstly she bathed it, and then she got it out of its stable. It rolled in the mud immediately, so she had to take it back into the stable and bath it, and then she let it run around the field. And what I was hoping to do eventually of course was to try to remove the horse from the backdrop completely - it's something that in film terms is normally known as blue screening, where you put something that isn't blue in front of a perfectly blue screen and then you can pick it out away from the blue screen. Unfortunately in making the horse run around a field against white sky and trees and clouds, it wasn't very easy to take out, so I had the horse just turning to look at Rafi then turning back to look at the audience.
In the last few years there seems to be a lot more video used in theatre - have you been doing more work in that area?
Yes, I have. I started off as a composer, so it's been a complete move sideways. I still do music as well. To a certain extent, in my opinion there's probably too much video used in theatre productions, and I think Philip's definitely of the same opinion. I was told at the start of this job that the Traverse isn't a multimedia theatre, and that was the idea with this production - to try and keep it minimal, but to have a reason for it. And I think that's an important aspect of using video in theatre - decide if there's a reason for it or not. And if it's not good enough, don't have it. Don't let it take over. And that's the point of this - people aren't going to be continually looking at that screen and having it upstage the actors. Yes, there's an enormous amount of video used in theatre - some absolutely stunning, and some totally unnecessary.
What motivates you in your work?
Learning new things is what always motivates me. If I'm asked to go over the same road too many times, I get too bored. I've a low boredom threshold, and I like learning new things. This has been completely new, because I've never done anything for plasma screen before, I've never done multilayered things, I've never done the digital stuff. The last job was completely different, and the one before that - that's what keeps me interested.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home